Apple's iPhone 11 Pro is tracking users who disable location services

The behaviour is against Apple's own privacy policy

Apple, the company that earlier this year took more steps to protect user privacy with an update to its Intelligence Tracking Prevention feature for Safari, is - whoops - tracking the whereabouts of iPhone 11 Pro users, even if they've disabled Location Services.

This was discovered by Brian Krebs, who found that even if a user disables location permissions for all individual apps and services, the iPhone 11 Pro continues to ping its GPS module to gather location data.

Apple's own support forum is littered with complaints from iPhone customers experiencing the same issue.

This sneaky behaviour is against Apple's privacy policy, which states that while the iPhone will periodically 'send the geo-tagged location of nearby WiFi hotspots and cell towers' in an encrypted form, users can disable location services entirely with one swipe (by navigating to Settings > Privacy > Location Services and toggling 'Location Services' to 'off').

'You can disable Location Services at any time,' the privacy policy states. 'You can also disable location-based system services by tapping on System Services and turning off each location-based system service'.

Krebs revealed in a video (below), which he sent to Apple in November , that even if you disable Location Services for every app individually and switch the device to flight mode, the GPS still pings a mysterious server when it is back online.

Krebs notes that the issue couldn't be replicated on an iPhone 8, indicating that there is something hardware-related with the iPhone 11 Pro; he speculates it could be somehow related to adding support for super-fast new WiFi 6 routers.

An Apple representative told Krebs that this is "intended behaviour" for the iPhone 11 Pro.

"We do not see any actual security implications," an Apple engineer wrote in a response to Krebs. "It is expected behaviour that the Location Services icon appears in the status bar when Location Services is enabled. The icon appears for system services that do not have a switch in Settings."